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This reminds me so much of my Mom. She smoked unfiltered Pall Mall for many years, I finally talked her into filters which she called "core tips". She would pick the paper and tobacco off of her lipstick. It acted like a glue to the ciggs. Didn't break her stride a bit.

Mom emigrated to Ohio in the early 1950s, but we would make the trek back to Maine and Vermont every year or two. My grandparents lived in Poland Corners, and my aunts and cousins lived in Portland. This picture is extremely familiar. The lady in plaid could be Aunt Laura, and the lady in the foreground could be Aunt Jeanette. Today, I love lobster, but back then, as a Midwestern boy, it totally grossed me out.

Someone really liked blue and white dishes, enough to buy three different patterns. One of them I don't recognize, but in the foreground we see the then fairly new Blue Danube pattern on the dessert plates; first imported in 1951, it was discontinued in 2010. A bunch of the coffee cups are in the perennial Blue Willow pattern which at least three manufacturers still make. It all harmonizes nicely with the lobster pot, not so nicely with the Chesterfields being snuffed out in the little dish in the foreground.

The increasing popularity of filtered cigarettes at this time was often attributed to a desire for a healthier (perceived) cigarette, but actually the lady in the foreground shows the real reason. Unfiltered cigarette smokers, mostly of the female variety, were getting sick of picking flecks of tobacco from their tongues! Also, who's going to eat all that lobster still in the pot? I volunteer.

In my memory of such dinners in Connecticut and Rhode Island, boiled lobster (and other shellfish) was always enjoyed on a table covered with several thicknesses of newspaper, nutcrackers, picks and Pyrex cups of melted butter.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.